Riga, from the rooftops to the food counters
Old Town towers, Central Market stalls, cold borscht and a memorable Latvian tasting menu.
Riga gave me two very different ways to take in the city: looking out over its rooftops and looking closely at what was on the table. The 2025 album moves between Old Town architecture, the Central Market and food notes that range from a restrained “decent” to an emphatic verdict on cheese miso.
Riga from above
At sunset, the river catches the last light beyond a church tower and rows of roofs. From up here, the buildings are part of a much wider city, with bridges stretching across the water and the skyline carrying on towards the horizon.
The aerial views made me think about Singapore: how much of life there is packed into a small space, and how different that familiar sense of density feels when looking across another city.
Riga Old Town
The Old Town photographs reward looking upward. One red-brick façade is full of pointed arches, patterned panels and circular windows. Another view follows a clock tower to its curved roof and the golden bird at the top.
These details give the streets a different character from the broad city view. Brickwork, metal roofs and ornament each have their own place in the album.
Riga Central Market · fish and pastries
The Central Market is the clearest meeting point between a place and its food in this album. Split fish fill orange trays behind a glass counter, their dark skins and golden interiors stacked almost edge to edge.
At the bakery counter, rows of pastries have fruit, nuts and pale fillings, with sugar dusted over their edges. Handwritten cards sit among them. These are the foods I photographed on the stalls; the meal notes elsewhere in the album tell a separate story about what I ate.
Riga · meals from the trip
Cold borscht brought a bright pink bowl of beetroot soup to the table. Rye-bread pudding appears in a glass dish with a swirl of pale cream. My verdict on both was straightforward: decent. The food notes also include a beef burger, beef stroganoff, kvass and a cheese crepe.
The Latvian tasting menu was more memorable. I called it creative, singled out the cheese miso as the best miso I had ever had, and remembered a meringue that combined sweet, salty and sour elements. The precise details were already escaping me when I wrote the caption, but the enthusiasm was clear. The bread presentation earned its own video.
